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Tuesday Tidbit: What Stinks About Your Website

Welcome to Tuesday! Today I'm going to give you some tough love about your website. Ready?

I found an article on the HubSpot blog recently called 17 Things People Absolutely Hate About Your Website. There were a couple points on it that I see EVERYWHERE when looking at websites, and I completely agree with HubSpot that most of the things they mention are annoying or not user-friendly.

I'd like to share with you a couple points from their long blog post that I've really been seeing everywhere, so that you can evaluate your own website!

It Uses Excessive Popups

One popup form is fine, but anything beyond that is annoying. Even one can be annoying! To make it not so annoying, make it "smart" so it only comes up when a user has completed an action you deem popup worthy, and use fun copy! Hubspot uses this popup form from Wait But Why as an example:

It's Littered with Generic or Cheesy Stock Photography

Nobody wants to be interacting with a faceless company anymore. They want to actually see and interact with you, real people at a real company! A bunch of fun-looking people in business attire is only a good option if it's your fun-loving employees in business attire. Not some generic ones that don't represent you at all. Here's a full HubSpot blog post with examples of bad stock images.

It Contains a Contact Form, but No Additional Contact Information

Although using a contact form can help cut down a lot on the spam email you receive, some people prefer to get in contact with you in another way - they don't like the anonymity of filling out a form and sending it out into cyberspace and hoping for a response. They want to call you, ask you a question on social media, or email a specific person.

It Doesn't Clearly Explain What Your Company Does

Ugh, business speak. If a regular person can't understand what your business does after reading your copy, something is wrong with it. If a site visitor can't immediately understand that they've landed in the right place for their challenge or need, they're going to bounce away.

Well, those are the couple things I picked out that I personally hate about websites. For me as a web marketer, I can optimize and advertise your site until I'm blue in the face, but if someone landing on your site is dissatisfied with how it looks or how it works enough to bounce away for that reason, that marketing has gone to waste.